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May 9, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

5/9/2014

IDHS continues to fine tune the Child Care Management System launched on January 14, 2014. We are doing our best to keep providers informed on the progress of payments. We are also working hard on correcting payment errors that have occurred in recent weeks.

To find out when your payment was entered, you can use 800-804-3833. That number will usually tell of entered payments the working day after entry, approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Please refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

If you have a question regarding a redetermination, approval, address change, certificate needed, the number of days entered in for a payment, and many other questions, you will need to contact your child care office that takes care of your case. Also, contact the child care office that handles the case for any payment that was issued but was not received, or for those returned undeliverable to The Office of the Comptroller.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Some months we still have funds from the previous month that allow us to approve some payments early in the current month. Many payments with an entry of May 6th were approved by DHS on Thursday night May 8th. After May 9th most payments entered that are waiting to be approved probably won't start to be approved until around May 15th, when our monthly funding becomes available.

**For issued payments, many payments approved by DHS on May 6th were issued by The Office of the Comptroller on Thursday night May 8th. We should have approved payments become issued for a couple more days. Otherwise, most payments won't be issued until after May 15th.

We realize there are some isolated problems with approved and issued payments lately that did not calculate correctly. A resolution and a reimbursement process was mailed in late March . The letter that was mailed can also be viewed on the DHS web site of: www.dhs.state.il.us . For those payments that had incorrect co-pay deduction, DHS has started to reimburse the amount owed as an add-on to the case(s) effected. Providers should see the reimbursement on payments issued in May.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue. Weekends and holidays are not working days.

To follow payments via the internet, you can see approved payments at: